Elections

Welcome to On Politics. I’m Nick Corasaniti, your host on Tuesdays for coverage of all things media and messaging. I’m writing from Philadelphia, where I’ve moved for the rest of the race and have subsisted largely on the true Philadelphia sandwich: the roast pork, provolone and broccoli rabe!The disclaimer was familiar to any Pennsylvania voter who has suffered through a commercial break this fall — “I’m Joe Biden, and I approve this message” — but the ad that had preceded it took no shots at President Trump’s leadership, nor did it offer any testament to Mr. Biden’s middle-class bona fides.Instead, a blue outline of the state of Pennsylvania appeared onscreen, and a narrator calmly walked through the importance of making sure anyone voting by mail correctly used the secrecy envelope.With just a week left to go in a multibillion-dollar political advertising season, campaigns have begun using their paid media operations to augment their get-out-the-vote efforts. Like so much else in 2020, it’s a shift from the norm: Traditionally, campaigns rely on their on-the-ground field teams, not their TV ads, to try to get voters to the polls.But a few unique elements of this election are making get-out-the-vote ads a necessary expenditure. First and foremost, in the middle of a pandemic, field operations cannot knock on doors and offer rides to voting locations at the scale necessary for a modern campaign.And with the electorate increasingly polarized, any closing-argument advertisements seeking to persuade undecided voters are fighting over a relatively small audience.“There just aren’t that many persuadable targets,” said Michael Beach, a Republican ad strategist. “Even in TV ads, early vote was mentioned in a lot of those ads, and traditionally that wouldn’t have been the case.”An ad from the Biden campaign in Pennsylvania talks about the mail-in voting process.With so many people voting by mail this year, campaigns have new opportunities to keep tabs on voters through the steps of the process — sending voters targeted ads encouraging them to request ballots, then following up with more ads prodding them to return those ballots.Most “ballot chase” programs, as they’re called, are run online, often through Facebook. Since many states offer data on who has requested a ballot and who has returned one, campaigns can target ads directly to those voters on Facebook. Once a voter returns a ballot, campaigns can remove that person from their target list and not waste any money on a vote already cast.“We can target you every step of the way,” Richard Walters, the chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, told me earlier this month. “We know when you requested the ballot, and we know to continue following up with you until your ballot has been returned, and until we can see it has been returned.”Digital ballot chase programs, while not entirely new, are being vastly expanded this election cycle. The Trump and Biden campaigns have dozens of ads telling voters to “Secure your ballot the safe way today!” and warning that “Time is running out to return your ballot!” (The Biden campaign even highlighted its ballot chase program in a fund-raising pitch.)While television ads cannot be targeted with the same precision, some advancements in data analysis have allowed for more focused pitches. Mr. Beach, through his company Cross Screen Media, compiled lists of likely early voters and swing voters in three major battleground-state markets: Detroit, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C. His team found that early voters tended to be older and watched a lot of cable and local news broadcasts, which are traditionally more expensive political advertising spaces.But when audiences who are presumed to have voted early were removed from the lists, the landscape changed dramatically: ESPN, E! and Comedy Central became the most popular channels among swing voters in those three markets who most likely hadn’t voted yet.So, maybe “SportsCenter” viewers can expect to see more ads with state-specific ballot instructions. But the more traditional ad wars are not letting up. The TV in the background of my Philadelphia apartment just blared that Mr. Biden “would be a president for all Americans” as I wrote this last sentence.Election 2020 More

If Mr. Biden wins — and Kamala Harris, who would be his vice president, becomes the tie-breaking vote in a prospective 50-50 Senate — Democrats will need to gain a net total of three seats to take control.The party sees prime seat-flipping opportunities in Colorado and Arizona. One Democratic incumbent, Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, is viewed as an underdog in his race. Republicans see another Democrat, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, as potentially vulnerable, too.So where might Democrats find the extra wins they’d need? Maine, North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Montana, South Carolina, even Kansas. They don’t need to win them all. But they are effectively forcing Republicans to play defense across the map. More

This has been, by any measure, a bad year for consensus reality.First, there was President Trump’s impeachment — a divisive and emotionally charged proceeding that unleashed a torrent of lies, exaggerations and viral innuendo.Then came the Covid-19 pandemic — an even bigger opportunity for cranks, conspiracy theorists and wishful thinkers to divide us along epistemic lines, into those who believed the experts and those who preferred to “do their own research.”The Black Lives Matter protests this summer were a feeding frenzy for those looking to distort and reframe the narrative about police violence and racial justice.And while election years are always busy times for fact-checkers, Mr. Trump’s fusillade of falsehoods about voter fraud, Spygate and Hunter Biden’s emails this year has resulted in a bigger challenge for those charged with separating truth from fiction.Zignal Labs, a firm that tracks online misinformation, analyzed which major news topics in 2020 were most likely to generate misinformation. Its data, which draws from sources including social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit, as well as newspapers and broadcast TV transcripts, isn’t an exact accounting of every single piece of misinformation out there. But it’s a rough gauge of which topics are most frequently used as vehicles for misinformation, by those looking to inject confusion and chaos into media narratives.(Quick methodological note: These “misinformation mentions” are limited to topics related to either the election or the Covid-19 pandemic, and are calculated by Zignal’s automated system based on the number of mentions of a given term along with a term that is frequently associated with misinformation. So, for example, a post that mentions vaccines in the context of Covid-19 would not be counted as a misinformation mention, but a post that mentions vaccines along with a hashtag like #FauciTheFraud or a name like Bill Gates — a frequent target of anti-vaccine activists — would be counted, even if the underlying story was debunking such a false claim.)The topic most likely to generate misinformation this year, according to Zignal, was an old standby: George Soros, the liberal financier who has featured prominently in right-wing conspiracy theories for years.Out of 2.6 million total media mentions of Mr. Soros so far this year, nearly half (1.1 million) were accompanied by terms (“Soros-funded,” “bankroll”) that suggested that he played a role in funding left-wing agitators. They peaked this summer, as false claims that Mr. Soros had funded Black Lives Matter protests went viral following the killing of George Floyd.Second on the list was Ukraine, which peaked as a misinformation topic in January and February, during Mr. Trump’s impeachment proceedings along with keywords like “deep state” and “WWG1WGA,” a shorthand used by followers of the QAnon conspiracy movement. About 34 percent of Ukraine’s 9.2 million total media mentions were flagged as misinformation-related.Third was vote-by-mail, which has been the subject of a torrent of misinformation by Mr. Trump and right-wing media outlets. Roughly one out of every five vote-by-mail stories in 2020 has been misinformation, according to Zignal’s analysis, with terms like “fraud” and “scam” being common red flags.With all three subjects, some of the most common spreaders of misinformation were right-wing news sites like Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit. YouTube also served as a major source of misinformation about these topics, according to Zignal.Of course, the misinformation we’ve seen so far this year might pale in comparison to what happens after next week’s election, if a contested result or allegations of fraud result in a new wave of false or misleading claims. Social media platforms have signaled that they will remove premature claims of victory, and attempts to delegitimize the election. But they also pledged to take down misinformation about Covid-19, and have had only mixed success in doing so.Here are the topics that generated the highest percentage of misinformation narratives:1. George Soros (45.7 percent misinformation mentions)2. Ukraine (34.2 percent)3. Vote by Mail (21.8 percent)4. Bio Weapon (24.2 percent)5. Antifa (19.4 percent)6. Biden and Defund the Police (14.2 percent)7. Hydroxychloroquine (9.2 percent)8. Vaccine (8.2 percent)9. Anthony Fauci (3.2 percent)10. Masks (0.8 percent) More

The 2020 presidential contest has been surrounded by dramatic events, by plague, protest and economic collapse, but as a campaign it’s been remarkably devoid of twists and turns. The polling has been mostly stable, the challenger has run the virtual equivalent of a front-porch campaign and mostly suppressed his own pugilistic instincts, and the incumbent has been unsurprisingly himself.Which makes it fitting, maybe, that the most interesting controversy of the campaign’s final week is a news media meta argument about how a story should be covered. That story is based on the claims of Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden and James Biden, respectively Joe Biden’s son and brother, and on a trove of emails and text messages of uncertain provenance. There are new details about the son and brother’s attempts to cut deals in China based on their family brand, but the key allegation is that Joe Biden himself was pulled into his son’s Chinese negotiations.On Sunday, my colleague Ben Smith produced the fascinating back story on the story: how the scoop was supposed to go to The Wall Street Journal, with Trump allies mediating, but then another Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani, handed some of the same emails to The New York Post, with a strange back story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which in turn led to a Post story, accusations of Russian disinformation and an attempted social-media blackout of The Post. Meanwhile, Journal reporters were unable to pin down if Joe Biden had any role in the deal, Bobulinski threw the story to the wider press, and only right-wing outlets ran with it. In the end, both the Journal and this newspaper covered the story in a dry and cautious fashion, describing the Bobulinski allegations while also stressing the lack of definite evidence of the former vice president’s involvement in any deal.If you’re still with me after that tangle, you can see that this isn’t a subject that lends itself to straight-ahead polemics. But let me try to perform punditry and draw out three provisional conclusions.The first is that the decision by Twitter to attempt to shut down the circulation of the New York Post story, which looked bad when it was made, looks even worse now that we have more of the back story and more evidence in view. At this point we can posit with some certainty that The Post’s story was not some sort of sweeping Russian disinformation plot but a more normal example of late-dropping opposition research, filtered through a partisan lens and a tabloid sensibility, weaving genuine facts into contestable conclusions. It was, in other words, analogous to all kinds of contested anti-Trump stories that various media outlets have run with across the last four crazy years — from the publicity around the Steele dossier’s wilder rumors to the tales of Michael Cohen’s supposed Prague rendezvous to the claims that Russians hacked Vermont’s power grid or even C-SPAN.In none of these cases did social-media minders step in to protect the public from possible fake news. As Matt Taibbi and other gadfly press critics have pointed out, it’s hard to come up with any reasonable social-media rule that would justify the suppression of The Post’s story that couldn’t just as easily be applied to all the pieces of conspiratorial Trump-Russia reportage that didn’t pan out, or the Julie Swetnick allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, or various scoops based on technically illegal leaks. That capriciousness is a bad sign for the project of harnessing social media giants to filter out disinformation; it suggests that any filter would inevitably feel partisan, partial and obviously reverse-engineered.In this case the intended reverse-engineering was basically, “don’t let 2016 happen again,” with “2016” being a stand-in for how the media covered the WikiLeaks revelations and the late-October surprise of Jim Comey reopening an F.B.I. investigation into Hillary Clinton based on material from Anthony Weiner’s laptop. But in neither of those cases was Russian “disinformation” crucial: The hindsight critiques revolve around how much play mainstream outlets gave those stories relative to others, and around Comey’s own self-interested and inconsistent decision-making. And there is no clear logical chain that runs from “the F.B.I. director made bad choices because he assumed Clinton would win and The New York Times gave those choices too much front-page space” to “we need to censor late-breaking allegations that appear in right-wing media on the chance that they might have been ginned up by the Russians.”Especially because of the second conclusion that we can draw from this episode, an insight I’m stealing from Smith’s piece: The power of media gatekeepers (like this newspaper) to shape political coverage is still significant, and just because some charge or scoop circulates in the right-wing ecosystem doesn’t mean that it has any impact beyond the realm of people who are already voting for Donald Trump.This is an important point because so much liberal analysis of why we might need things like Twitter blackouts assumes that mainstream media institutions have no power anymore — that “the elite level of national news, the places that have traditionally set the agenda,” as Hamilton Nolan wrote recently for The Columbia Journalism Review, have seen their power simply dissolved by technological change.But that’s not exactly right. The internet has certainly created new spaces for eccentric ideas and conspiratorial narratives to flourish, and the transformation of the Republican Party into a populist formation with its own distinctive media ecosystem has weakened the power of national newspapers to influence Republican politicians. But the G.O.P. speaks for a minority of Americans and fewer and fewer American elites, and the internet has also expanded the audience for certain media institutions at the expense of the rest of the media industry, giving them arguably more influence over the non-Fox News-watching portion of the public than in the recent past. This means institutions like The Times or the Washington Post have a different kind of power than they did 30 years ago, but they have power all the same — including the power to contain almost any story that initially circulates on the right, and to shape the way the non-right-wing portions of the country receive it.This, in turn, makes it reasonable for conservatives to fear the concentric circles of tech and media power — the possibility that social-media censorship, carried out “neutrally” by companies overwhelmingly staffed by liberals, will expand its reach with the vocal support of an increasingly consolidated and liberal group of mainstream-media gatekeepers.But it also makes it reasonable for people who are not conservatives to worry about what stories they might be missing, if those same gatekeepers have an incentive to treat anything that originates outside those concentric circles as some combination of disinformation and partisan distraction.Hence my third conclusion — that for those who feel this worry, the Hunter Biden controversy provides a clarifying case study. On the one hand, the new information is not the Biden-slaying blockbuster suggested by the New York Post headlines and some Trump supporters. But neither does it fit the description offered by NPR’s managing editor for news last week, explaining why they were only covering it as a media story: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”In fact, it’s not a distraction to have new insight into a potential First Son’s business dealings — especially given that the saga of the younger Biden is a prime example in how a milder-than-Trump form of corruption pervaded the American elite long before Trump came along, with important people and their families constantly finding ways to get rich in the shadow of the Pax Americana without ever taking anything so crass as a bribe.It is not a coincidence, as some of my Times colleagues note in their story, that “the countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously been involved as vice president.” Nor is it a coincidence that the areas of Hunter Biden’s particular interest, China’s and Russia’s near abroad, were particularly important foreign policy zones under recent Democratic presidents. And given that pre-Trump American foreign policy in these regions was a conspicuous failure — with China tilting totalitarian and Vladimir Putin outmaneuvering the West — the fact that Biden’s nearest relative was trying to influence-peddle in both places is a useful reminder of why the establishment that’s likely to reclaim the White House next week lost power in the first place.More specifically, Bobulinski’s story and the email evidence both suggest that Joe Biden took at least enough interest in his son’s dealings to have a meeting during the Trump presidency with his business partners. This isn’t proof that he partnered with Hunter or profited in any way, but it seems like evidence that he wasn’t particularly worried about keeping his son’s sketchy salesmanship at arm’s length. That seems like information worth knowing: not a scandal on a par with some of Trump’s, not a front-page bold-type screaming headline, but something that belongs in the pages of a newspaper, because it’s interesting news.This is the problem with Twitter’s censorious choices, and with an expanding mainstream-press definition of what counts as disinformation and distraction. They compromise the first duty of an independent press, which is to ground any moral crusading in the most capacious possible portrait of the world as it actually exists.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

New York City voters continued to show up at the polls on Monday, with every expectation of waiting hours in the cold, drizzling rain. They brought camping chairs. They read old magazines. They made phone calls.Nearly 315,000 city residents cast their ballots on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, the first three days of early voting in the state. That’s six times the number of people who voted early in the June primaries. Many reported waiting in line for hours.It’s “unbelievable,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday. “Literally, we’ve seen nothing like it before.”The long lines are also in violation of state regulations.On Monday afternoon, Robert A. Brehm, co-executive director of the state board of elections, sent a memo to local boards — including New York City’s — reminding them that wait times should not exceed 30 minutes. The memo directed local boards of election to fix the wait times with extra equipment, more workers and whatever else was necessary by Tuesday.But why is voting taking so long?Here are our five takeaways from the first three days of early voting in New York City.People are serious about the right to vote.Kevin Shade waited outside the Brooklyn Museum to vote on Monday. The socially distanced line stretched from the museum entrance, down the building’s west side, through its back parking lot, up Washington Avenue and onto Eastern Parkway. Mr. Shade, a 32-year-old woodworker, said he and his girlfriend “were willing to wait however long it was going to take.” He had no umbrella and his hair was damp from the drizzle. But he held a cup of coffee and held out hope for the political process. “One person can’t change the election but you can make your vote and hopefully the right outcome will happen,” he said.His enthusiasm mirrored what is happening all over the country, as people flock to the polls to vote early. In New York, this was the first time early voting was an option in a presidential election.In front of the Brooklyn Museum, Patricia Chan, 38, had packed snacks and passed the time reading “Catch-22.”She was encouraged by the turnout.“It’s wonderful to see everyone out and exercising their right to vote, even in the rain,” she said. “It says a lot about the spirit of the time that people are out here.”Voters are afraid their absentee ballots will not be counted.In September, the city’s Board of Elections sent out as many as 100,000 defective ballot packages with wrong names and addresses, many of them to voters in Brooklyn. Election 2020 ›What You Need to Know About VotingHow to Vote: Many voting rules have changed this year, making it a little trickier to figure out how to cast your ballot. Here’s a state-by-state guide to make sure your vote is counted. Three Main Ways to Vote: We may be in the midst of a pandemic, but whether you vote in person on Election Day, a few weeks early, or prefer to mail in your ballot this year, it can still be a straightforward process. Do You Still Have Time?: Voters in 35 states can request ballots so close to Election Day that it may not be feasible for their ballots to be mailed to them and sent back to election officials in time to be counted. Here’s a list of states where it’s risky to procrastinate. Fact-Checking the Falsehoods: Voters are facing a deluge of misinformation about voting by mail, some prompted by the president. Here’s the truth about absentee ballots.Just three months earlier, the board had thrown out tens of thousands of ballots, citing technical errors like missing postmarks and poorly sealed envelopes. President Trump has seized on the mishaps, claiming “fraud” and fanning fears about the integrity of mail-in ballots, though voter fraud through mail ballots is rare.New York officials and advocates are worried less about fraud than bureaucratic incompetence. “I voted early because the Board of Elections screwed up,” said John Kaehny, the good-government advocate who runs Reinvent Albany and a resident of the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. This summer, only two of the four voters in his household got their absentee ballots during the June primary, and they decided not to take any chances this time.“We didn’t anticipate that the lines would be so long for early voting,” he said.In fact, lines at Mr. Kaehny’s early voting site — West Side High School on 102nd Street — have stretched so long that they have deterred Douglas A. Kellner from voting there three times.Mr. Kellner, the co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections and a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, tried to vote on Saturday at 3:30 p.m., but the wait was two hours long. He tried again Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, but again decided to hold off. “Each time the line was so long,” Mr. Kellner said.There are not enough polling sites.New York City has 88 early polling sites for five million registered voters.The mayor recommended at least 100.Some major institutions that get city tax breaks and could have acted as polling sites refused to open their doors for early voting. A WNYC analysis found that the city forgoes nearly $600 million a year in property tax revenue from institutions like museums and performance venues that declined to host early voting.Frederic M. Umane, a city elections board commissioner, said the Metropolitan Museum of Art backtracked.“We had designated them and their staff lunchroom as an early voting site and they initially said they could, but then they decided that because of Covid they can’t and won’t,” he said. “We decided not to sue them.” The museum did not respond to a request for comment.The distribution of the polling sites has also caused concerns about equity.Staten Island has 10 sites, or one site for every 32,000 registered voters. Manhattan has 16 sites, or one site for every 75,000 voters.Cradlepoint routers are slowing down voting. What are they? On Monday, Mr. de Blasio urged the city Board of Elections to deploy more of the voting machines that it has in storage, in anticipation of Election Day on Nov. 3, when 1,201 polling sites will be open. But it’s not clear that would solve the board’s problems.According to Mr. Kellner, polling site capacity is limited by the constraints of their cradlepoints, boxy black wireless network routers that can only accommodate eight electronic poll pads and printer stations each. That’s how voters are checked in, meaning there can be major delays.Mr. Kellner, the state board co-chair, did some math to break down the city’s problem: “If it takes two minutes to process each voter at the electronic poll book, well then, if everybody’s waiting in line, that station can only handle 30 voters per hour.” “And if you only have six stations, then that’s only 180 voters per hour,” he continued. “And that’s the fundamental arithmetic that the New York City board is very bad at.”The state is trying to find a way to enable more poll pads to be used with the routers to check in voters, Mr. Kellner said.A spokeswoman for the city’s Board of Elections declined multiple requests for comment.Who’s to blame?The city Board of Elections is plagued by nepotism, dysfunction, and a structure that works against political accountability. No elected official owns it. Rather, its ten commissioners are appointed by Democratic and Republican party leaders in the city’s five counties, making New York the only state in the country to have elections boards chosen almost entirely by party bosses.State lawmakers have shown no appetite to amend the state Constitution, which establishes the board’s structure.The orphaned status of the board was reflected in a recent back and forth between Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio.The governor said the board’s dysfunction was the city’s fault. The mayor begged to differ.Mr. Kaehny, the government watchdog, said, “The powers that be don’t care.”Matthew Sedacca contributed reporting. More

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused on Monday to revive a trial court ruling that would have extended Wisconsin’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots to six days after the election.The vote was 5 to 3, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority. As is typical, the court’s brief, unsigned order gave no reasons. But several justices filed concurring and dissenting opinions that spanned 35 pages and revealed a stark divide in their understanding of the role of the courts in protecting the right to vote during a pandemic.The ruling was considered a victory for Republicans in a crucial swing state, which polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing in after winning by about 23,000 votes in 2016.The Democratic Party of Wisconsin immediately announced a voter education project to alert voters that absentee ballots have to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3. “We’re dialing up a huge voter education campaign,” Ben Wikler, the state party chairman, said on Twitter. The U.S. Postal Service has recommended that voters mail their ballots by Oct. 27 to ensure that they are counted.The ruling came as President Trump continued to attack mail-in voting, which Democrats are using far more heavily this year. In a tweet late Monday, Mr. Trump falsely declared that there were “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.” (Twitter quickly put a warning label on the tweet.)The ruling was also the latest in a flurry of election-year decisions by the court that have mostly upheld voting restrictions, and the Trump campaign and its Republican allies are seeking similar restrictions on ballot deadlines in other states. Cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania are pending before the court, the latter a second attempt after a 4-to-4 deadlock last week. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed and sworn in to the Supreme Court on Monday night, could cast the decisive vote in that case.In Monday’s opinions, divisions over voting rights that had been hinted at in some of the previous rulings came more clearly into the open.In one concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, wrote that federal trial judges should not alter state voting rules when an election is looming. “Elections must end sometime, a single deadline supplies clear notice, and requiring ballots be in by Election Day puts all voters on the same footing,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.“No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges,” he wrote. “But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted.”In a separate concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that “the Constitution principally entrusts politically accountable state legislatures, not unelected federal judges, with the responsibility to address the health and safety of the people during the Covid-19 pandemic.”In earlier litigation concerning Wisconsin’s primary elections in April, the court required that ballots be mailed and postmarked by Election Day. But it did not disturb a similar six-day extension for receipt of the ballots, which had not been challenged in the case then before it.Election 2020 ›What You Need to Know About VotingHow to Vote: Many voting rules have changed this year, making it a little trickier to figure out how to cast your ballot. Here’s a state-by-state guide to make sure your vote is counted. Three Main Ways to Vote: We may be in the midst of a pandemic, but whether you vote in person on Election Day, a few weeks early, or prefer to mail in your ballot this year, it can still be a straightforward process. Do You Still Have Time?: Voters in 35 states can request ballots so close to Election Day that it may not be feasible for their ballots to be mailed to them and sent back to election officials in time to be counted. Here’s a list of states where it’s risky to procrastinate. Fact-Checking the Falsehoods: Voters are facing a deluge of misinformation about voting by mail, some prompted by the president. Here’s the truth about absentee ballots.In dissent on Monday, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the state’s experience in April was telling.“That extension of Wisconsin’s ballot-receipt deadline ensured that Covid-related delays in the delivery and processing of mail ballots would not disenfranchise citizens fearful of voting in person,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Because of the court’s ruling, state officials counted 80,000 ballots — about 5 percent of the total cast — that were postmarked by Election Day but would have been discarded for arriving a few days later.”Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. filed a brief concurring opinion explaining why the Wisconsin case differed from the one from Pennsylvania in which the justices deadlocked over whether the state’s Supreme Court could extend the deadline for mailed ballots by three days.“While the Pennsylvania applications implicated the authority of state courts to apply their own constitutions to election regulations, this case involves federal intrusion on state lawmaking processes,” the chief justice wrote. “Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin.”A divided three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Chicago had blocked the trial court’s ruling in the Wisconsin case, saying it came too close to the election and amounted to judicial interference in “a task for the elected branches of government.”The Supreme Court’s order on Monday let the appeals court’s ruling stand, restoring a hard deadline for accepting absentee ballots to 8 p.m. Nov. 3, when the polls close.The appeals court majority, in an unsigned opinion joined by Judges Frank H. Easterbrook and Amy J. St. Eve, said the trial judge’s extension was improper.“Voters have had many months since March to register or obtain absentee ballots; reading the Constitution to extend deadlines near the election is difficult to justify when the voters have had a long time to cast ballots while preserving social distancing,” the judges wrote. “The district court did not find that any person who wants to avoid voting in person on Election Day would be unable to cast a ballot in Wisconsin by planning ahead and taking advantage of the opportunities allowed by state law.”In dissent, Judge Ilana D. Rovner responded that “no citizen should have to choose between her health and her right to vote.”“The inevitable result of the court’s decision today will be that many thousands of Wisconsin citizens will lose their right to vote despite doing everything they reasonably can to exercise it,” Judge Rovner wrote. “This is a travesty.”In his concurrence on Monday, Justice Kavanaugh criticized what he called Justice Kagan’s “rhetoric of ‘disenfranchisement.’”She responded that she had meant the word literally, not rhetorically.“During Covid, the state’s ballot-receipt deadline and the court’s decision upholding it disenfranchise citizens by depriving them of their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote,” she wrote. “Because the court refuses to reinstate the district court’s injunction, Wisconsin will throw out thousands of timely requested and timely cast mail ballots.”Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting from Philadelphia, and Stephanie Saul from New York. More

What happened in the Senate chamber on Monday evening was, on its face, the playing out of a normal, well-established process of the American constitutional order: the confirmation of a president’s nominee to the Supreme Court.But Senate Republicans, who represent a minority of the American people, are straining the legitimacy of the court by installing a deeply conservative jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, to a lifetime seat just days before an election that polls suggest could deal their party a major defeat.As with President Trump’s two earlier nominees to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the details of Judge Barrett’s jurisprudence were less important than the fact that she had been anointed by the conservative activists at the Federalist Society. Along with hundreds of new lower-court judges installed in vacancies that Republicans refused to fill when Barack Obama was president, these three Supreme Court choices were part of the project to turn the courts from a counter-majoritarian shield that protects the rights of minorities to an anti-democratic sword to wield against popular progressive legislation like the Affordable Care Act.The process also smacked of unseemly hypocrisy. Republicans raced to install Judge Barrett barely one week before a national election, in defiance of a principle they loudly insisted upon four years ago.The elevation of Judge Barrett to be the nation’s 115th justice was preordained almost from the moment that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last month. When she takes her seat on the bench at One First Street, it will represent the culmination of a four-decade crusade by conservatives to fill the federal courts with reliably Republican judges who will serve for decades as a barricade against an ever more progressive nation.This is not a wild conspiracy theory. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and one of the main architects of this crusade, gloated about it openly on Sunday, following a bare-majority vote to move Judge Barrett’s nomination to the Senate floor. “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” Mr. McConnell said. “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”That’s the perfect distillation of what this has been all about. It also reveals what it was never about.It was never about letting the American people have a voice in the makeup of the Supreme Court. That’s what Mr. McConnell and other Senate Republicans claimed in 2016, when they blocked President Obama from filling a vacancy with nearly a year left in his term. As of Monday, more than 62 million Americans had already voted in the 2020 election. Forget the polls; the best indicator that Mr. McConnell believes these voters are in the process of handing both the White House and the Senate to Democrats was his relentless charge to fill the Ginsburg vacancy.It was never about fighting “judicial activism.” For decades, Republicans accused some judges of being legislators in robes. Yet today’s conservative majority is among the most activist in the court’s history, striking down long-established precedents and concocting new judicial theories on the fly, virtually all of which align with Republican policy preferences.It was never about the supposed mistreatment that Robert Bork, a Reagan nominee, suffered at the hands of Senate Democrats in 1987. That nomination played out exactly as it should have. Senate Democrats gave Judge Bork a full hearing, during which millions of Americans got to experience firsthand his extremist views on the Constitution and federal law. He received an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, where his nomination was defeated by Democrats and Republicans together. President Ronald Reagan came back with a more mainstream choice, Anthony Kennedy, and Democrats voted to confirm him nine months before the election. Compare that with Republicans’ 2016 blockade of Judge Merrick Garland, whom they refused even to consider, much less to vote on: One was an exercise in a divided but functioning government, the other an exercise in partisan brute force.How will a Justice Barrett rule? The mad dash of her confirmation process tells you all you need to know. Republicans pretended that she was not the anti-abortion hard-liner they have all been pining for, but they betrayed themselves with the sheer aggressiveness of their drive to get her seated on the nation’s highest court. Even before Monday’s vote, Republican presidents had appointed 14 of the previous 18 justices. The court has had a majority of Republican-appointed justices for half a century. But it is now as conservative as it has been since the 1930s.Of all the threats posed by the Roberts Court, its open scorn for voting rights may be the biggest. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the lead opinion in the most destructive anti-voter case in decades, Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the central provision of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to rampant voter suppression, most of it targeted at Democratic voters. Yet this month, Chief Justice Roberts sided with the court’s remaining three liberals to allow a fuller count of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania. The four other conservatives voted against that count. In other words, with Justice Barrett’s confirmation the court now has five justices who are more conservative on voting rights than the man who nearly obliterated the Voting Rights Act less than a decade ago.In 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protected same-sex marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia angrily dissented. “A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy,” he wrote.The American people, who have preferred the Democratic nominee in six of the last seven presidential elections, are now subordinate to a solid 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.Republicans accuse those who are trying to salvage the integrity and legitimacy of the Supreme Court with trying to change the rules or rig the game. Having just changed the rules in an attempt to rig the game, that’s particularly galling for them to say.The courts must not be in the position of resolving all of America’s biggest political debates. But if Americans can agree on that, then they should be able to agree on mechanisms to reduce the Supreme Court’s power and influence in American life.As Justice Scalia would put it, a democracy in which the people’s will is repeatedly thwarted by a committee of unelected lawyers is not a democracy at all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

WASHINGTON — President Trump has repeatedly bragged about what he has done for Black America, pointing to his administration’s funding for Black colleges and universities, the creation of so-called opportunity zones and criminal justice reform.But on Monday, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, played into a racist stereotype by seeming to question whether Black Americans “want to be successful” despite what he said Mr. Trump had done for them.“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” Mr. Kushner said in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” the president’s favorite morning cable show. “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”In the interview, Mr. Kushner said that after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man, in police custody — an event that set off global protests about systemic racism, and which Mr. Kushner referred to as the “George Floyd situation” — a lot of people were more concerned with what he called “virtue signaling” than in coming up with “solutions.”“They’d go on Instagram and cry, or they would put a slogan on their jersey or write something on a basketball court,” he said, an apparent reference to N.B.A. players like LeBron James who joined national protests over the issue of police brutality. “And quite frankly, that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward,” he said. “You solve problems with solutions.”Mr. Kushner’s remarks prompted a scathing response from Representative Gwen Moore, a Black Democrat from Wisconsin. She tweeted: “Trust fund baby slumlord Kushner who has enriched himself in the WH takes the silver spoon out of his mouth long enough to insert his foot with a racist trope about Black people and success.”The Democratic National Committee was equally harsh.“According to the Trump administration, when African-Americans find fault in policies that have led to historic unemployment for Black families, an explosion of racial inequities and wealth gaps, and an uncontained global pandemic that has taken the lives of over 45,000 Black Americans, it means that we just don’t want to be successful badly enough,” said Brandon Gassaway, the national press secretary for the committee. “This dismissive approach to the issues that Black voters care about is indicative of Trump’s callousness and disregard for the lives of Black people.”Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, defended Mr. Kushner by saying his remarks were taken out of context. She accused unnamed “internet trolls” for trying to “distract from President Trump’s undeniable record of accomplishment for the Black community.”Mr. Trump’s frequent references to what he has claimed to have done for Black America have often been accompanied by one of the most patently false claims he has made since moving into the White House: that he has done more for Black Americans than any president with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.At his debate Thursday night, his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., mocked that claim by the president. “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history,” he said, looking at Mr. Trump. “He pours fuel on every single racist fire. Every single one.”And Mr. Trump exaggerates his successes.“The idea that Trump has done something that is tremendous, or different, when it comes to H.B.C.U.s defies logic,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard, referring to historically black colleges and universities. “It is virtually identical to what every president has done since Ronald Reagan. The executive order they issued in 2017 used the exact same language that Barack Obama used.”Mr. Trump has been praised for signing a criminal justice overhaul bill into law — with the caveat that the bipartisan coalition of players, including the billionaire Koch brothers, who supported the move, was firmly in place before Mr. Trump became interested in the issue.And the tax break for opportunity zones constantly cited by Mr. Trump has spurred relatively little job creation while disproportionately helping high-profit real estate projects, according to a study by the Urban Institute released this summer.A recent CBS News poll found that 85 percent of registered Black voters felt that as president, Mr. Trump “favors white people.” About 79 percent of those voters said he “works against” Black people.But Mr. Kushner said in the interview that he had been hearing from Trump campaign state directors across the country about a “groundswell of support in the Black community, because they’re realizing that all of the different bad things that the media and the Democrats have said about President Trump are not true.”Top campaign officials have said that their goal is to win at least 10 percent of Black voters in November, and that increasing the president’s support among Black voters by as little as two percentage points could sway the election. In 2016, Mr. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters. More